Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Hope Hicks has seen it all

by digby

David Corn runs down the story of Hope Hicks' involvement in the Russia scandal. She is right in the middle of it. So Mueller's interview is not a benign little exercise in understanding her boss's schedule. He concludes with this:

Hicks was putting out false information—but it was a line consistent with the campaign’s stonewall. Its top officials had been informed that the Kremlin was trying to covertly assist Trump, yet Trump and his aides constantly denied Putin was meddling in the election. And some of the contacts between Trump campaigners and Russians—particularly those of Papadopoulos and Page—were known by senior campaign officials. Yet the campaign revealed none of these interactions during the election, when Russia’s involvement was a major controversy.

Is it possible Hicks was unaware of all this activity? She did know about Page’s trip to Moscow; she commented on it publicly. And she was directly informed that Trump Jr. had been in contact with WikiLeaks. According to The Atlantic, after Trump Jr. received the first message from WikiLeaks, he emailed other senior campaign aides, including Kushner, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and Brad Parscale to tell them WikiLeaks had reached out to him. Kushner forwarded this email to Hicks.

Hicks has been by Trump’s side since 2014, when she went to work for the Trump Organization. (Prior to that she was at a New York public relations firm contracted by Ivanka Trump.) She was with Trump when he decided to fire FBI chief James Comey. She was on Air Force One when Trump reportedly got involved in drafting a misleading White House statement regarding the meeting between Trump Jr., Kushner, Manafort and the Russian emissary. Mueller and his crew have much to talk about with Hicks. But she is not just any witness. She is part of the cover-up.

I find her to be one of the more intriguing characters in the Trump inner circle. She is a very beautiful, young woman who came into the Trump organization via a job at Ivanka's clothing brand company. Her relationship with Trump is apparently quite close although I've never heard that it's anything beyond professional.

But whatever it is, she's privy to a lot of information and there's no doubt that the special prosecutor will have many questions for her. She should not be so foolish as to protect her boss. She is in serious legal jeopardy which I'm sure her lawyer has told her. Let's hope she's smart enough to listen. Trump wouldn't stick by her if the roles were reversed.